Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters: The Frightening New Normalcy of Hating Your Body

by Courtney E. Martin

  Your body has ideas about what it wants to eat and how it wants to move. You may need to remember what you loved doing at five or ten or fifteen and start doing it again. When I am sweating and jumping and stomping my way through African dance class, I feel young and completely alive, freed from the boredom of listening to the same damn thoughts running through my head—Is this done? Is that done? I am just leaping. Skipping, jumping, playing soccer, dancing, diving, and making love are not fitness plans but ways to move in the world.

  There is no there; there is only here. It makes sense that ambitious women are forward-thinking—it is our mojo. We plan, set goals, move on. We drive ourselves a little crazy. Try, every once in while, just being still. Try noticing the color of your bathroom tiles. Try feeling the shower while you are in it. Try appreciating the softness of your socks or the wide berth of your butt. It is good for sitting on. Try eating slowly and noticing the strange texture of a chip. Try eating Jelly Bellies with your eyes closed, one at a time, and guessing the flavors. Try reaching for your toothbrush very, very, very slowly. Try observing one interesting thing about every person in the waiting room.

  The past is full of angst-inducing memories. Once you’ve eaten something, you’ve eaten it. Stop remembering that you’ve eaten it. Stop evaluating whether it was good or bad that you ate it. Don’t reward yourself. Don’t chastise yourself. Forget about it. It happened. It’s over. No big deal.

  There is no measure of a life well lived. You have to create joy and not push away sadness. Don’t weigh yourself. The number is irrelevant. How do you feel? Stop being a perfect girl and start enjoying your life’s little wonderful things. Rediscover or, in many of our cases, discover for the first time, the importance of small pleasures.

  I’m talking about eating a slice of warm pizza when it’s freezing outside, sharing a beer at the end of the day with your best friend, taking a nap without setting your alarm. I’m talking about laughing during sex. I’m talking about playing poker with the guys. I’m talking about dancing with the girls. I’m talking about Saturday-night board games and Sunday-afternoon softball. I’m talking about spontaneity— Popsicles in the snow, hot dogs on the street, calling in sick on the spur of the moment. Celebrate everything and anything—your first publication in a magazine, the anniversary of the day you paid off your college debt, a Thursday. You are young. Act like it.

  There is no eternal reward for achieving; there is only believing. Believe in something, anything, that makes the day feel shorter and the night less lonely. If you are atheist, more power to you, but believe in your own strong moral center. If you are agnostic, dwell in that place of unknowing with a certain amount of wonder. If you have a set religious viewpoint, use it to liberate, not restrict, you. Don’t let it become a new holy war in your head. Make it the bedrock of your kindness. Don’t let any spiritual leader or religious dogma convince you that your body is anything but fine. It is not dirty. It is not dangerous. It is actually something of a miracle.

  Whole Beauty

  There is no perfection; there is only the beauty of imperfection. Gap teeth are so often endearing. Scars are intriguing. A big nose is memorable. Stray moles lead us places. I hated my toes for years—they bend in odd places, as if bowing to some formidable foot god. Then one day I was sitting waiting for the subway with my mom, both of us in open-toed shoes, and a stranger walked up and said, “You must be mother and daughter. You have the same toes.” I looked down, and lo and behold, we were cut from the same cloth. I’ve had a secret affection for my crooked toes ever since. Quirks can push people head over heels into love. A set of formidable hips can make a man swoon. It is our strangeness, not our sameness, that attracts people to us.

  Thinness is unremarkable. Everyone and her mother are thin. As a matter of fact, everyone and her mother have those same expensive highlights, those trendy new boots that cost a fortune, and those flat stomachs that fit very little inside. Sure, it seems pleasing to the eye at first—you recognize it instantly, it doesn’t challenge you to think at all, it matches what you have seen on television and in fashion magazines. But there is also nothing to explore, nothing to learn, nothing to be surprised by. How dreadfully boring.

  You know what is really, powerfully sexy? A sense of humor. A taste for adventure. A healthy glow. Hips to grab on to. Openness. Confidence. Humility. Appetite. Intuition. A girl who makes the world seem bigger and more interesting. A girl who can rap. A loud laugh that comes from her belly. Smart-ass comebacks. Presence. A quick wit. Dirty jokes told by an innocent-looking lady. Hooded sweatshirts. Breakfast in bed. A girl with boundaries. Grace. Clumsiness. A runny-nosed crier. A partner who knows what turns her on. Sassy waitresses. Pretty scientists. Any and all librarians (okay, maybe this is my issue). Truth. Vulnerability. Strength. Naïveté. Big breasts. Small breasts. Doesn’t matter the size, they all fascinate. A girl who can play the blues harp. A girl who calls you on your bullshit but isn’t afraid to love you in spite of it. A storyteller. A genius. A doctor. A new mother. A woman who realizes how beautiful she is.

  Strength in Numbers

  There is no recipe for a collective uprising; there are only friendships strengthened by truth and suffering. There are you and your best friend, making a pact to stop supporting each other’s delusional diet schemes. There is a compassionate coed lying on her standard-issue dorm bed, feet sticking off the end, composing what she will say to her roommate when she gets back from the bathroom. There is air so thick you feel like you could choke on it during that confrontation, and then the air afterward, so clear and weightless it feels like you are walking on the moon. There is a phone call in the middle of the day. Nik answers, and I admit, through tears I am embarrassed to shed but will anyway, that I am feeling terribly sad and alone.

  There is no social change in isolation; there is only the power and the poison of the company you keep. Don’t date guys who have unrealistic expectations about your body or say mean things to you. Don’t surround yourself with friends who compete, undermine, or belittle you. Indulge your girl crushes. When you meet an amazing woman you admire and feel is way out of your friend league, take a chance and ask her to hang out. It has worked for me with many of the women you have read about in this book, and I feel smarter and better just being around them.

  And as important and more often overlooked, enjoy creating close relationships with guy friends who start out all hard and witty on the outside and end up being even mushier and more insecure than your girlfriends on the inside. They are good for your soul and your perspective.

  Don’t worship women who make it all look easy. Seek out mentors who are wise and generous and evolved most of the time and amusingly flawed the rest, women who are honest about the hard work and the small and profound rewards—such as getting to know a young woman like you.

  There are no total and instantaneous solutions to a problem so intractable, so cultural, so institutional; there are only individual choices made each day that add up to change. Take responsibility instead of resigning yourself to a life of passive consumption and benign neglect. Your money is your mouth, however small and insignificant the voice coming out may seem. Support companies and causes that make the effort, even if based on the bottom line, to support your healthy body image. Dove’s Real Beauty campaign may have had its flaws, but it sent a message to the rest of the corporate world: Women will pay for respect. Nike is running in Dove’s footsteps. More will follow. Laugh at advertisements that try to make you believe you need a certain brand of suit or a certain color of hair or a certain miracle pill to feel okay in the world. The joke is on them. You already feel okay, and you are sitting on the couch in your ratty pajamas with your unwashed hair and not so much as a Dexatrim in the kitchen cabinet.

  Don’t read magazines that make you feel like shit. You probably don’t need expert studies to confirm what you already feel—that flipping through the latest W has a direct correlation with your body anxiety—but just for kicks: researchers at t
he University of Kentucky found that girls exposed to average-weight model images were less likely to endorse thinness or restricting behaviors than were those exposed to Kate Moss and her crew. Pick up BUST for a change and experience how nice it is to look at hot ladies wearing clothes you could fit in and afford—a combo seemingly impossible between the pages of the average newsstand fare.

  Don’t see movies or buy albums by celebrities who think women’s bodies are more interesting than their minds. Don’t spend your hard-earned money on gimmicks that make people much richer than you. Don’t buy thigh cream. It doesn’t work. Don’t diet, ever. Kathy Davis, a feminist scholar, writes of this need to say no in an era when we are constantly being pressured to say yes: “In our present ‘culture of mystification’—a culture that constantly entices us with false promises of power and pleasure—we need to be concerned with domination rather than freedom and with constraint rather than choice.” In this extreme-makeover, instant gratification, excess-for-less world, your power often comes from what you don’t do rather than what you do. Don’t, first and foremost, be a sucker for the commercial culture’s version of beauty.

  The Beginning

  No one story describes our healing, but there will be moments when the light is let in. You can call them tipping points. You can call them intervening moments. You can call them, as the Zen master and mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh does, the first step in a journey of a thousand miles. We all have the responsibility to recognize these moments in our lives and do what is hard to do.

  You may need to sleep in one day instead of making yourself go to the gym. You may enjoy an ice cream cone without once thinking about the calories involved. You may choose to order a burger instead of a salad simply because you feel like it. Or you may choose to order a salad instead of a burger because you realize that your pleasure in life comes from many sources, not just food. You may think about leaning over to your friend and whispering something mean about the girl sitting across from you but decide otherwise. You may force yourself to look in the mirror for five minutes straight, disputing every judgmental thought that comes your way. You may play a pickup game of basketball one Saturday. You may just learn to love yourself again.

  There is no healing without help.

  There is no power as potent as possibility.

  There is no transformation without truth.

  There is no change without vulnerability.

  There is no wisdom greater than that found inside you.

  There is no beauty without struggle or aberration.

  There is no statement like your life.

  There is no end.

  There are only beginnings.

  Here are some beginnings that I experienced along the way: When I set out to run the three-mile loop in Prospect Park, just blocks away from my house in Brooklyn, I begin determined and relieved. Finally a chance to get out of my bedroom, stacked with unread books and piles of red-marked drafts threatening to swallow me up. I breathe deeply, feeling grateful for the fresh air. My apartment, I realize upon leaving it, smells like garlic and old beer. I need to take out the recycling.

  I put my iPod buds in my ears and fall in line beside a spandexed woman jogging and pushing a stroller. I briefly admire her dedication and her flat stomach. She must have really worked off that pregnancy fat fast. The little one asleep in a mountain of blankets doesn’t look much older than a few months.

  I try to imagine myself at that stage of life. Will I have the willpower to put my baby in a stroller and push it all the way around the loop in the park? I can barely motivate myself to run, without the added complication of a potentially cranky baby. In fact, it seems I’m still my own baby most of the time.

  I start shuffling through my to-do list in my head and instantly feel overwhelmed. Why did I ever agree to write that book review? I have so many papers to grade. What am I going to get my mom for her birthday? As if there is a straight line connecting my left brain to my right knee, I feel an ache. I need better running shoes. Tough it out, Courtney. It’s just three miles. You used to be able to do this with no problem.

  And the more I tell myself how easy it used to be, the harder it becomes. My knee is really hurting. Or is it? Come on, Courtney, buck up. Run out the pain—it is just momentary. Don’t make a big deal out of it. You planned to run the loop today. It is on your to-do list. You won’t have time to run tomorrow, so this is your only chance.

  The woman with the stroller leaves me in the dust without a bead of sweat on her brow. She looks light as a feather. I feel heavy as a boulder. I feel competitive. I feel cranky. I cling to control. Keep running. Run through the initial pain and your body will loosen up and you’ll get in that zone. Maybe I should pause and stretch. No, that will take extra time you don’t have. Shut up. Keep running.

  But I am tired and I am stiff and I am writing a book about women’s rigid obsession with fitness and I don’t want to be a hypocrite. I want to listen to my own body. I want to be kind to myself. I want to be smarter than the voice inside my head that tells me I am nothing if I can’t run a three-mile loop without stopping.

  And so I stop. Before I have even consciously decided to do it, I feel my body slowing down, and I am walking, one foot in front of the other; my arms swing, and the pain in my knee subsides, and I hear the music again—as if planned, “Oh, Happy Day,” my favorite gospel song. My breath comes easily. The relief floods in. I see the trees, just beginning to grow green and lush again, all around me. I am awed by the shimmering light on the surface of the lake. I see a little boy throwing handfuls of smashed stale bread at a grateful party of ducks, and I smile to myself.

  I am not superwoman. I did not stick to my plan. I won’t burn as many calories. I am not even in great shape. But I am not a hypocrite. I am not in pain. I am not in a mental arm-wrestle with myself. I am breathing deeply. I am moving. I am seeing the world around me. I am healthy. I am not perfect, but I am happy.

  And here is another beginning:

  I am sitting at a picnic table with a chattering gaggle of eight-year-old girls high on their morning Pop-Tarts. They are sprinkling sparkles over pools of glue and telling me stories about their moms and sisters, who “get worried and then eat, like, only grapefruit and stuff for days but then screw up and eat chips or something and then feel bad and then eat more grapefruit and stuff.” I ask them what they think “pretty” is.

  The ringleader, a stocky blonde with a gap between her two tiny, Chiclet-like front teeth, jumps up from the table and practically screams: “You want to see my impression of a prom queen?”

  “Yes, definitely,” I reply, trying to move my voice recorder so it will pick up her performance.

  She puts one hand on her head, palm facing up, apparently symbolizing a crown, and the other on her hip, and then starts sashaying around the picnic table in circles, shouting, “Hey, boys, look at me! Look at me, boys! Look at my royal heinie, boys! Isn’t it so cute?” The rest of the gaggle erupts in exaggerated little-girl laughter, throwing themselves on the picnic table and dragging their knotty hair through the pools of sparkles.

  One little girl, with a voice as small as any I have ever heard and hair black as the crows perched in the piñon trees surrounding us, leans over to my notebook and writes with a stubby, orange-colored pencil, “You are pretty. I think you have nice hair,” and encircles her secret messages in a big lopsided heart.

  “Thank you,” I whisper in her ear, tears threatening to sneak out of the corners of my eyes. This little girl thinks I am asking these questions because I really don’t know the answers. Suddenly it occurs to me that she is probably right. I am looking for wisdom from eight-year-olds with puff-painted shirts and stacks of brightly colored rubber bracelets.

  I am not looking in the wrong place. I ask, “What about in the future? Do you think you will worry about stuff like your moms and big sisters in the future?”

  A spindly little animal of a girl made entirely of bone and muscle jumps off th
e picnic table with her arms splayed out from her sides in the shape of wings and shouts, “In the future there will be flying cars! In the future, we will all be beautiful!”

  And here is another beginning:

  You.

  Resource Guide

  Treatment Centers

  Caringonline: www.caringonline.com

  Eating Disorder Referral and Information Center: www.edreferral.com

  Hyde Park Counseling Center: www.hydeparkcenter.com

  Mirasol: www.mirasol.net

  Rader Programs: www.raderprograms.com

  The Renfrew Center: www.renfrewcenter.com

  Remuda Ranch: www.remuda-ranch.com

  Advocacy Organizations

  Academy for Eating Disorders: www.aedweb.org

  Alliance for Eating Disorders Awareness: www.eatingdisorderinfo.org

  American Obesity Association: www.obesity.org

  Council on Size and Weight Discrimination: www.cswd.org

  Dads & Daughters: www.dadsanddaughters.org

  Eating Disorders Coalition: eatingdisorderscoalition.org

  Eating Disorders Anonymous: www.eatingdisordersanonymous.org

  HEED Foundation: www.helpingendeatingdisorders.org

  National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders: www.anad.org

  National Center for Overcoming Overeating: www.overcomingovereating.com

  National Eating Disorders Association: www.nationaleatingdisorders.org

  National Eating Disorders Screening Program: www.mentalhealthscreening.org

  Overeaters Anonymous: www.oa.org

  Feminist Nonprofit Organizations and Centers

  Barnard Center for Research on Women: www.barnard.edu/bcrw